research-article

Open access

Making crafting visible while rendering labor invisible on the Etsy platform

Authors:

Gary HsiehAuthors Info & Claims

DIS '22: Proceedings of the 2022 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference

Pages 424 - 438

https://doi.org/10.1145/3532106.3533573

Published: 13 June 2022 Publication History

All formats PDF

Abstract

Historically, crafts have been associated with women’s small-scale creative production in the home, equated with hobbies or amateur production, and devalued in comparison to both art and industrial production. During its early years, Etsy was seen as a champion of “handmade”, bringing visibility to crafts and providing economic value. This paper presents results of a qualitative study with 18 small online sellers of Etsy platform. Our study shows that Etsy’s sociotechnical design results in a high burden of invisible labor for sellers, including categories of labor not replicated by other online platforms. These new categories include negotiation and articulation work around defining and defending “handmade” products, understanding one’s intellectual property and how (and whether) to defend that IP elsewhere on the platform, understanding working of platform algorithms and adapting to changing platform regulations. Our findings provide new ways to frame the challenges faced by producers/sellers on emerging marketplace platforms.

Supplemental Material

PDF File

Seller interview protocol

Download
129.22 KB

References

[1]

Davina Allen. 2014. The invisible work of nurses: hospitals, organisation and healthcare. Routledge.

[2]

Dafna Bearson, Martin Kenney, and John Zysman. 2019. New Work and value creation in the platform economy: a taxonomy and preliminary evidence. eScholarship, University of California.

[3]

Annemarie Bridy. 2016. Copyright’s digital deputies: DMCA-plus enforcement by Internet intermediaries. In Research handbook on electronic commerce law. Edward Elgar Publishing.

[4]

Eliane Léontine Bucher, Peter Kalum Schou, and Matthias Waldkirch. 2021. Pacifying the algorithm–Anticipatory compliance in the face of algorithmic management in the gig economy. Organization 28, 1 (2021), 44–67. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350508420961531

[5]

Juan Carlos Alvarez de la Vega, Marta E. Cecchinato, and John Rooksby. 2021. “Why lose control?” A Study of Freelancers’ Experiences with Gig Economy Platforms. In Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445305

Digital Library

[6]

Miriam A Cherry. 2016. People analytics and invisible labor. Saint Louis University Law Journal 61 (2016), 1.

[7]

GrowthHackers Community. 2021. The Story of Etsy’s Crafty Growth to IPO and a $2 Billion Valuation. https://community.growthhackers.com/posts/the-story-of-etsys-crafty-growth-to-ipo-and-a-2-billion-valuation.

[8]

Alexandra Cuervo. 2012. Risky Business: Buyers and Sellers on Etsy.com. Unpublished Thesis (2012).

[9]

Arlene Kaplan Daniels. 1987. Invisible work. Social problems 34, 5 (1987), 403–415.

[10]

Jennifer deWinter, Carly A Kocurek, and Stephanie Vie. 2017. Managing community managers: Social labor, feminized skills, and professionalization. Communication Design Quarterly Review 4, 4 (2017), 36–45. https://doi.org/10.1145/3071088.3071092

Digital Library

[11]

Dhriti Dhaundiyal, Sanket Pai, Mechthild Cramer, Sandra Buchmueller, Sugandh Malhotra, and Corinna Bath. 2021. The Larger Picture: A Designerly Approach to Making the Invisible Domestic Workloads of Working Women Visible. In Asian CHI Symposium 2021. 221–228. https://doi.org/10.1145/3429360.3468224

Digital Library

[12]

Motahhare Eslami, Kristen Vaccaro, Min Kyung Lee, Amit Elazari Bar On, Eric Gilbert, and Karrie Karahalios. 2019. User attitudes towards algorithmic opacity and transparency in online reviewing platforms. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300724

Digital Library

[13]

Etsy. 2020. 2020 Transparency Report. https://storage.googleapis.com/etsy-extfiles-prod/Etsy_2020_Transparency_Report.pdf

[14]

Anna Farmaki and Antonios Kaniadakis. 2020. Power dynamics in peer-to-peer accommodation: insights from Airbnb hosts. International Journal of Hospitality Management 89 (2020), 102571. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhm.2020.102571

[15]

Angela Feltes. 2022. kindredthreads. https://www.etsy.com/shop/kindredthreads

[16]

David Gauntlett. 2013. Making is connecting. John Wiley & Sons.

[17]

Ali Gheitasy, José Abdelnour-Nocera, and Bonnie Nardi. 2015. Socio-technical gaps in online collaborative consumption (OCC) an example of the etsy community. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual International Conference on the Design of Communication. 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1145/2775441.2775458

Digital Library

[18]

Amelia Gier. 2022. AGierDesign. https://www.etsy.com/shop/agierdesign/?etsrc=sdt

[19]

Debby Glickman. 2022. DebbyGlickmanPottery. https://www.etsy.com/shop/DebbyGlickmanPottery?ref=condensed_trust_header_title_updates

[20]

Melody Hahm. 2020. Etsy seller: ‘2020 was one of the best years I’ve ever had’. https://www.yahoo.com/video/etsy-sellers-coronavirus-pandemic-ecommerce-boom-164811976.html.

[21]

Erin Hatton. 2017. Mechanisms of invisibility: rethinking the concept of invisible work. Work, employment and society 31, 2 (2017), 336–351. https://doi.org/10.1177/0950017016674894

[22]

David Hesmondhalgh. 2010. User-generated content, free labour and the cultural industries. ephemera 10, 3/4 (2010), 267–284.

[23]

Arlie Russell Hochschild. 2010. The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. The Production of Reality: Essays and Readings on Social Interaction (2010), 320À336. https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520951853

[24]

Maya Holikatti, Shagun Jhaver, and Neha Kumar. 2019. Learning to Airbnb by engaging in online communities of practice. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 3, CSCW(2019), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1145/3359330

Digital Library

[25]

Doreen Jakob. 2013. Crafting your way out of the recession? New craft entrepreneurs and the global economic downturn. Cambridge journal of regions, economy and society 6, 1 (2013), 127–140. https://doi.org/10.1093/cjres/rss022

[26]

Shagun Jhaver, Yoni Karpfen, and Judd Antin. 2018. Algorithmic anxiety and coping strategies of Airbnb hosts. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems. 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3173995

Digital Library

[27]

Alita Joyce. 2019. How to Measure Learnability of a User Interface. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/measure-learnability/.

[28]

Yong Ming Kow and Waikuen Cheng. 2018. Complimenting invisible work: Identifying hidden employee contributions through a voluntary, positive, and open work review system. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 2, CSCW(2018), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1145/3274365

Digital Library

[29]

Michele Krugh. 2014. Joy in labour: The politicization of craft from the arts and crafts movement to Etsy. Canadian Review of American Studies 44, 2 (2014), 281–301. https://doi.org/10.3138/CRAS.2014.S06

[30]

Michele A Krugh. 2016. Etsy, Inc.: Crafting a Living in a Capitalist Economy. Ph. D. Dissertation. George Mason University.

[31]

Min Kyung Lee, Daniel Kusbit, Evan Metsky, and Laura Dabbish. 2015. Working with machines: The impact of algorithmic and data-driven management on human workers. In Proceedings of the 33rd annual ACM conference on human factors in computing systems. 1603–1612. https://doi.org/10.1145/2702123.2702548

Digital Library

[32]

Susan Luckman. 2013. The aura of the analogue in a digital age: Women’s crafts, creative markets and home-based labour after Etsy. Cultural Studies Review 19, 1 (2013), 249–270.

[33]

Susan Luckman. 2015. Women’s Micro-Entrepreneurial Homeworking: A ‘Magical Solution’to the Work–Life Relationship?Australian Feminist Studies 30, 84 (2015), 146–160. https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2015.1038117

[34]

Sally J Markowitz. 1994. The distinction between art and craft. Journal of Aesthetic Education 28, 1 (1994), 55–70. https://doi.org/10.2307/3333159

[35]

David Martin, Benjamin V Hanrahan, Jacki O’Neill, and Neha Gupta. 2014. Being a turker. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing. 224–235. https://doi.org/10.1145/2531602.2531663

Digital Library

[36]

Marieke Möhlmann and Lior Zalmanson. 2017. Hands on the wheel: Navigating algorithmic management and Uber drivers’. In Autonomy’, in proceedings of the international conference on information systems (ICIS), Seoul South Korea. 10–13.

[37]

David Nemer, Ian Spangler, and Michaelanne Dye. 2018. Airbnb and the costs of emotional labor in havana, cuba. In Companion of the 2018 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing. 245–248. https://doi.org/10.1145/3272973.3274066

Digital Library

[38]

Renee Noortman. 2021. Data-Enabled Futuring: Designing for and with the Invisible. In Companion Publication of the 2021 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference. 16–19. https://doi.org/10.1145/3468002.3468233

Digital Library

[39]

Mansa Ohshimizu. 2022. Japanese ramen bowl, ceramic bowl, salad bowl, fruits bowl, serving bowl. https://www.etsy.com/listing/1077430792/japanese-ramen-bowl-ceramic-bowl-salad?ga_order=most_relevant&ga_search_type=all&ga_view_type=gallery&ga_search_query=ceramic+bowl+handmade&ref=sc_gallery-1-6&frs=1&cns=1&sts=1&plkey=b498a5290320930aea168f940dadd3c135f94654%3A1077430792

[40]

Tyler Pace, Katie O’Donnell, Natalie DeWitt, Shaowen Bardzell, and Jeffrey Bardzell. 2013. From organizational to community creativity: paragon leadership & creativity stories at etsy. In Proceedings of the 2013 conference on computer supported cooperative work. 1023–1034. https://doi.org/10.1145/2441776.2441892

Digital Library

[41]

Maria Pengue. 2021. Etsy Statistics: Buyers Demographics, Revenues, and Sales. https://writersblocklive.com/blog/etsy-statistics/.

[42]

Jennifer Puentes. 2018. Invisible Labor: Hidden Work in the Contemporary World. https://doi.org/10.1177/0094306118755396e

[43]

Hatim A Rahman. 2021. The invisible cage: Workers’ reactivity to opaque algorithmic evaluations. Administrative Science Quarterly 66, 4 (2021), 945–988. https://doi.org/10.1177/00018392211010118

[44]

Noopur Raval and Paul Dourish. 2016. Standing out from the crowd: Emotional labor, body labor, and temporal labor in ridesharing. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing. 97–107. https://doi.org/10.1145/2818048.2820026

Digital Library

[45]

Jason Del Rey. 2015. To Get to Its IPO, Etsy Made Its Toughest Decision 17 Months Ago. https://www.yahoo.com/video/etsy-sellers-coronavirus-pandemic-ecommerce-boom-164811976.html.

[46]

Johnny Saldaña. 2021. The coding manual for qualitative researchers. sage.

[47]

Andrey Shevchuk, Denis Strebkov, and Alexey Tyulyupo. 2021. Always on across time zones: Invisible schedules in the online gig economy. New Technology, Work and Employment 36, 1 (2021), 94–113. https://doi.org/10.1111/ntwe.12191

[48]

Kevin Stankiewicz. 2021. Etsy CEO hopes to build more e-commerce market share no matter what happens with Covid. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/26/etsy-ceo-josh-silverman-on-the-companys-post-covid-growth.html.

[49]

Susan Leigh Star and Anselm Strauss. 1999. Layers of silence, arenas of voice: The ecology of visible and invisible work. Computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) 8, 1 (1999), 9–30. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008651105359

Digital Library

[50]

Miriam Sturdee, Sarah Robinson, and Conor Linehan. 2020. Research Journeys: Making the Invisible, Visual. In Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference. 2163–2175. https://doi.org/10.1145/3357236.3395590

Digital Library

[51]

Lucy Suchman. 1995. Making work visible. Commun. ACM 38, 9 (1995), 56–64.

Digital Library

[52]

Carlos Toxtli, Siddharth Suri, and Saiph Savage. 2021. Quantifying the Invisible Labor in Crowd Work. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 5, CSCW2(2021), 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1145/3476060

Digital Library

[53]

Apryl A Williams, Zaida Bryant, and Christopher Carvell. 2019. Uncompensated emotional labor, racial battle fatigue, and (in) civility in digital spaces. Sociology Compass 13, 2 (2019), e12658. https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.12658

[54]

Esther A Zuccaro. 2016. Gucci v. Alibaba: a balanced approach to secondary liability for e-commerce platforms. North Carolina Journal of Law & Technology 17, 5 (2016), On–144.

Cited By

Cheon EXu S(2024)Creative Precarity in Motion: Revealing the Hidden Labor Behind Animating Virtual CharactersProceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3643834.3661545(3471-3484)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3643834.3661545
Chordia IBaltaxe-Admony LBoone ASheehan ADombrowski LLe Dantec CRingland KSmith A(2024)Social Justice in HCI: A Systematic Literature ReviewProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642704(1-33)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3642704
Borgos-Rodriguez KPiper A(2023)Understanding Participation among Disabled Creators in Online MarketplacesProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36101057:CSCW2(1-28)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2023
https://doi.org/10.1145/3610105
Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Platform sharing: From reseller to marketplace
Highlights
- We examine the motivations for an online retailer that exclusively resells goods to open its platform to competing sellers.
Abstract
We examine the motivations for an online retailer that exclusively resells goods to open its platform to competing sellers. We further examine competing seller’s incentives to join such a platform. The retailer can receive rent and ...
3D Shadow Art Sculpture Based On Real Items
C&C '17: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGCHI Conference on Creativity and Cognition

Existing 3D shadow sculptures could be made by 3D printing to generate shadows in 3 or more directions, but a 3D printed sculpture looks too technical and has less artistic feel. This paper develops a unique method and a new tool to create 3D shadow art ...
Handmaking Food Ideals: Crafting the Design of Future Food-related Technologies
DIS '18 Companion: Proceedings of the 2018 ACM Conference Companion Publication on Designing Interactive Systems

Much technology is designed to help people enact processes faster and more precisely. Yet, these advantages can come at the cost of other, perhaps less tangible, values. In this workshop we aim to articulate values associated with handmade through a co-...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

DIS '22: Proceedings of the 2022 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference

June 2022

1947 pages

ISBN:9781450393584

DOI:10.1145/3532106

Editors:
Florian `Floyd' Mueller
Monash University, Melbourne, Australia
,
Stefan Greuter
Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia
,
Rohit Ashok Khot
RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia
,
Penny Sweetser
The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia
,
Marianna Obrist
University College London, UK

Copyright © 2022 Owner/Author.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License.

Sponsors

SIGCHI: ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 13 June 2022

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article
Research
Refereed limited

Data Availability

Seller interview protocol https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3532106.3533573#Seller_Interview_Protocol.pdf

Conference

DIS '22

Sponsor:

SIGCHI

DIS '22: Designing Interactive Systems Conference

June 13 - 17, 2022

Virtual Event, Australia

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 1,158 of 4,684 submissions, 25%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

4
Total Citations
View Citations
1,011
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)454
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)41

Reflects downloads up to 18 Jan 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Cheon EXu S(2024)Creative Precarity in Motion: Revealing the Hidden Labor Behind Animating Virtual CharactersProceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3643834.3661545(3471-3484)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3643834.3661545
Chordia IBaltaxe-Admony LBoone ASheehan ADombrowski LLe Dantec CRingland KSmith A(2024)Social Justice in HCI: A Systematic Literature ReviewProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642704(1-33)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3642704
Borgos-Rodriguez KPiper A(2023)Understanding Participation among Disabled Creators in Online MarketplacesProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36101057:CSCW2(1-28)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2023
https://doi.org/10.1145/3610105
Hsieh JAdisa OBafna SZhu H(2023)Designing Individualized Policy and Technology Interventions to Improve Gig Work ConditionsProceedings of the 2nd Annual Meeting of the Symposium on Human-Computer Interaction for Work10.1145/3596671.3598576(1-9)Online publication date: 13-Jun-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3596671.3598576

View Options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

HTML Format

View this article in HTML Format.

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents